Dr. Rhonda Patrick

Over 2,000 participants who reported never using vitamin D supplements developed dementia compared to just 679 of those participants who actually did report using vitamin D supplements.

Supplementing with vitamin D was also associated with a greater five-year dementia-free survival.

So 84% of adults in the vitamin D group were free of dementia during this time period, while only 68% of the non-vitamin D users were dementia-free during that same period.

And this was also true regardless of whether or not

The participants had baseline mild cognitive decline or normal cognitive function.

So vitamin D seemed to provide a benefit in both of those scenarios.

And while dementia prevalence was higher in adults with mild cognitive impairment, it was around 15% lower in this group for adults who supplemented with vitamin D compared to those who didn't.

So in other words, even if you already had some sort of

mild cognitive impairment, you still had a lower risk of actually transitioning to dementia if you were supplementing with vitamin D. Although vitamin D supplementation reduced dementia risk among all groups, there were several interesting findings regarding the benefits of vitamin D for certain populations.

So, for example, women derived the greatest benefit from vitamin D. They actually experienced less dementia compared to men who supplemented.

And while vitamin D using men had a 26% lower dementia incidence than non-users, vitamin D using women had almost a 50% lower incidence compared to non-using women.

So really, there's a much bigger difference in terms of women having a lower incidence.

And I'm wondering if that's because generally speaking, women get dementia and Alzheimer's disease

about twice as higher of a frequency than men do.

So there just might be more of a signal here to lower.

That's one possibility.

Adults that had normal baseline cognitive function had a 56% lower dementia incidence if they supplemented with vitamin D, but adults that did have mild cognitive impairment only had a 33% lower incidence of dementia if they supplemented.

So in other words, if you were already, if you started out dementia-free and healthy,

vitamin D had a more robust effect on lowering your dementia incidence, which makes sense.

If you're already in a state of mild cognitive impairment, it's much harder to kind of reverse damage that's already been done.